The Construction of Identity in John Banville’s The Book of Evidence

Abstract

In the present paper, I propose to discuss how I read The Book of Evidence and, echoing Robert Scholes’s words, how I inscribe it into the textuality of my life. Scholes actually says that “...each text can only be read by connecting it to the unfinished work of textuality...” (6) that each person’s reading represents. Therefore, as I read The Book of Evidence, it immediately reminded me of Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment and Capote’s In Cold Blood. At the moment I read these novels, I thought my reading of them complete and closed. Dostoyevsky’s narrative had opened my eyes to the deep psychological anguish of a young man who feels trapped in his social plight and commits a murder only to confirm the famous cliché that crime does not pay and the path of goodness should always be chosen. I remember turning the pages expecting to find some relief after so much despair. Many years later I dared read Capote’s novel. The scene of the merciless massacre of the Clutter family remained with me after a long time as well as the sordid and marginal existence of the murderers and their hopeless path to death. When I took up The Book of Evidence I was ready for the same kind of reading experience. But, in spite of its deep intertextuality with Dostoyevsky’s novel, the unexpected tone of the narration suggested that I should generate a substantially different reading strategy in order to make sense of it.